MacBook Pro Performance (November 2007)

Apple quietly updated the MacBook Pro along with the MacBook earlier this month.
The MacBook update was quite substantial; the updated added, among other things, the Santa Rosa chipset to the MacBook which improved performance dramatically. The MacBook Pro update wasn't as substantial; it added a larger hard drive and a faster processor as build-to-order options.

What I (and others) have wondered is the faster processor (an Intel Core 2 Duo T7800 at 2.6GHz) worth the price? I've gathered Geekbench 2 results for all three MacBook Pro processor configurations to find out.

Setup

• MacBook Pro (Mid 2007)
  • Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.60GHz or
  • Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.40GHz or
  • Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.20GHz
  • 2.00 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
  • Mac OS X 10.5.1 (Build 9B18)

I’m reporting the baseline score, rather than the raw score, for the benchmarks (where a score of 1000 is the score a Power Mac G5 1.6GHz would receive). Higher is better.

Results

Overall Performance

Integer Performance

Floating Point Performance

Memory Performance

Stream Performance

Conclusion

On the latest MacBook Pros, processor benchmark scores (Integer Performance and Floating Point Performance) scale with processor speed; a 20% increase in speed will bring about a 20% increase in score.

Memory benchmark scores (Memory Performance and Stream Performance) are a different story. Since all of the MacBooks have the same chipset and use the same memory (which influence memory benchmark scores far more than the processor), there isn't as much of a gain.

So, is configuring a MacBook Pro with a 2.6GHz processor instead of a 2.4GHz processor worth it? If you're running a lot of processor-intensive tasks where even a small increase in performance is noticeable (and appreciated) then you might want to consider it. Otherwise I'd recommend adding more RAM instead. More RAM will probably help your MacBook Pro performance more than just a faster processor.